24-31/ Eight Scary Things

I was 14, and my friends and I were hanging out below street level in an apartment building (where none of us lived) when the cops showed up. “Cry!” Duke demanded of me in a whisper. It was good advice. Unrelated to this incident, he and several others in our group grew up to join the NYPD.

My two years with the nuns (see My Year With the Nuns) at ages 10 and 11 qualifies as a scary thing, at least for the first few weeks after I arrived. So unfamiliar. So lonely. And the presence of the nuns, even the kind ones, didn’t help. Those long black habits. The head coverings. Hands covered much of the time as well. The way they drifted silently around the convent, like wraiths.

A brand new driver, I was pretty careful except for one piece of colossally stupid arrogance. Most of our intersections in Queens had stop signs on two of the corners, but one close to where I lived did not. Duke (there he is again) was in the passenger seat one day when I went sailing through the intersection without even slowing down. At his alarmed objection, I explained, “If they’re not going to bother to put up a stop sign, I’m not going to bother to stop.”

At one time my husband owned a small chemical company in NJ. I helped out in the office a couple of days a week, leaving the girls (my son wasn’t born yet) with a woman who lived nearby. At the end of one day, on my way to pick up my daughters, I stopped at the supermarket. I was almost ready to leave when an explosion shook the entire store. The glass windows in front rippled in slow, giant waves. Beyond, a mushroom-shaped cloud marked a spot I knew well. “The chemical company finally blew up,” a customer said. Yes, it did.

I've lost my singing voice. This might not be a scary thing to most people, but I find it scary. And sad. Even in childhood, singing was something I loved and did well enough to be noticed for it. Well into adulthood, I was known for my singing voice more than anything else. I sang in public, and singing at the piano at home was my meditation, my cardio, my sanity saver. Just ask my three kids. But now, rather suddenly, my voice has become unreliable. I can't count on hitting a note perfectly like I used to, and there's a whole middle range where I can't guarantee anything sounding like a note will emerge at all. I don't know what happened. 

Just inside the door to the apartment where I grew up, we had a coat closet. When I was an adolescent, I hid inside the closet and jumped out at my stepmother when she came home. She was both frightened and furious, shaking and demanding that I never do that again because she could have a heart attack. Many years passed before I fully understood, but now I do.

When a pet disappears, it’s scary. Even if they’re gone for only a short time, it’s easy to “awfulize”—imagining them stolen, or shot, or hit by a car. I’ve had many pets, and I’ve experienced this fear many times. One was found with her leg caught in a steel trap. The person who found her was the man who set the trap, and we were fortunate that he returned her to us. We had other fortunate returns as well. And then there were two we never saw again. Not knowing is the worst.

“I keep thinking Gillian’s going to die,” I told my husband. Gillian was just days old at the time, a healthy newborn. He reassured me, but the fear persisted. Months later, driving home in one of our big Cadillacs, Jill in her infant car seat, the thought came into my head that a high-speed crash would save us both from the pain that would come later. I pushed it away, and told myself my crazy thoughts must be a postpartum depression thing. Twenty-five years later, the pain came.